Following yesterday’s AT&T Buzz.com story I thought I would follow it up with a Google Buzz story. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do a story about Yahoo! Buzz. Ilya Grigorik of PostRank, one of my favorite analytics startups, has a very interesting post about explaining what all the content in Google Buzz actually is.
90% of the content in Google Buzz is automated. Between Twitter and imported RSS feeds there is almost no original content in Google Buzz. On one hand that’s probably okay with Google because they’re learning a lot about you. On the other hand with only 10% of the content posted being original content (this would be the actual conversations) it’s hard to imagine Buzz actually surviving as a social network.
Buzz was a pretty big bet by Google. They tied it to one of their flagship products, Gmail, and took a lot of heat over privacy concerns and it even caused legal action against Google. It’s still early in the game and I wouldn’t count Buzz out but Google doesn’t have a good track record with social networks.
In its prime Friendfeed had all the same data being dumped in to it but there was at least a lot of active conversations happening. I know I rarely ever use Buzz, what about you?
[Update] What PostRank failed to mention and I assumed was in their data was that PostRank can’t measure the comments to the content being aggregated into Buzz. Illya only brought that up in the comments of the post. I never claimed to be a journalist or to check secondary sources but that was still a #FAIL on my part.
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